Randy Osherow; Ron White

Randy Osherow

          A few months after I transferred from the Northside Sun to the Express-News retail advertising department in early 1978, I got a message to call on a lawyer who wanted to advertise cheap divorces. The law concerning professional advertising had just changed, and it had gone from lawyers not being allowed to advertise to: okay, lawyers may advertise, but it’s considered tacky.

          This lawyer wasn’t above seeming a bit tacky, but he did have a sense of humour. His name was Randy Osherow — Randolph N. Osherow, but he stuck determinedly to Randy. He was a burly, red-headed guy who grinned at every opportunity. The burliness came from being an iron-pumping freak. He also ran with his Labrador, named Winchester. He wore standard-issue lawyer suits and cowboy boots. His father had made a small fortune with a direct-mail advertising business in St Louis. His wife, Ceci (Cecilia), was the daughter of a Venezuelan oil family. Ceci ran his office. She also painted. Her painting teacher encouraged her to be a fauvist.

          Randy’s office was in a upscale-townhouse/condo/office complex just north of snobby Alamo Heights. It was the place where Federal Judge John Wood got shot down outside his home by Woody Harrelson’s father in a contract killing for some Lebanese-Mexican gamblers and importers. The victim of this crime had picked up the handle of “Maximum John” Wood for his invariable decisions not to err on the side of leniency. Randy, as a lawyer, considered Maximum John to be “a mean man.”

          Randy wanted to run long, wordy advertisements filled with legal advice — to make himself look substantial, I guess (I never asked him why) — but he only wanted to buy wee little ad spaces, so I had to employ my editing and proofreading skills beyond the limits of what editing and proofreading could accomplish. Eventually he dropped this approach when the newspaper insisted that he clearly label his essays as advertisements.

          One day when I was in his office picking up copy and having a yack, I tossed my MasterCard across the desk to him and told him to divorce me from my second wife, who’d gone to live with some chap in a tipi out in the country.

          Twice I went to parties at his law offices. At one I got picked up by a crazy blonde society interior decorator, who also had premises at the complex where Randy’s office was. She found me to be a fascinating bearded “Hebrew”, and sold me weed later on when I was involved with somebody else. At the other I got too drunk on the Chivas Regal and behaved somewhat embarrassingly.

          Randy and Ceci had me by for a meal a few times in their nice but cramped apartment a half a block or so from the campus of Trinity University. Randy was one of those folks who didn’t like to stray too far from the scene of those bright student days. Ceci was one of those folks who never quite knew what to make of me.

          They had my mother and me over for dinner one time when she was in San Antonio.

          When I took up jogging I went out jogging a few times with Randy. He’d go slow for me and then have a bit of an extra run once I was finished.

          I couldn’t believe how naive he was about some things. He couldn’t believe that athletes could be into drugs. Hell, he’d been hanging around gyms since he’d been a kid. He’d never seen anything that’d made him think of the other iron-pumpers doing shit. He was crushed when it got out that a couple of the San Antonio Spurs were associated with cocaine.

          And we kept hanging out. I can’t explain it. It was Randy who suggested to me, long after I’d left the advertising racket and was struggling to get by freelancing, that I should take up teaching, which I proceeded to do.

          Somewhere along the line Randy decided to get off divorces and into bankruptcies. The whole process delighted him. I’d been doing some part-time work for him updating his law library. He showed me his desk drawer: no more box of tissues. He’d been tired of having to watch people cry in his office. And the pissed-off men could be dangerous. Bankruptcies, on the other hand (he told me), were a revelation. He said he loved to watch the expressions on his clients’ faces when he told them which debts they wouldn’t have to pay: “They kinda snicker the first time they say, ‘You mean I’m not gonna have to pay that?’, and a lot of them walk out of here laughing.”

          Randy’s some kind of poobah in the bankruptcy lawyers’ association now. He’s been a Trustee of the United States Bankruptcy Court. I tracked him down on line and we kept in touch for a few years in the new century. He told me he once wore a Hugo Chavez t-shirt at his Venezuelan-oil-money in-laws’ house. We’re both weird for detective novels and recommended them back and forth to each other for a while. He mailed me a copy of Nick’s Trip, by George P. Pelecanos. Last I heard before we lost touch again, he and Ceci were headed to China to adopt a baby.

Ron White

          Usually an invisible wall separates the people in the advertising department of the Express-News and the people in the editorial department: the editors, reporters, columnists, sports writers, and so on. I could see that I would probably be able to get along better with the people in editorial than with my fellow advertising jerks and creeps. And I was mildly acquainted with some of the editorial people from Truckers and from just being around.

          In the Autumn of 1977 I auditioned for a part in a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and got cast as Gooper, Big Daddy’s other son. Ron White, the Express-News’s critic-at-large had been moderately kind to me in his review (“... a wild man in a business suit” was a phrase he used), and I ran into him in the elevator at the newspaper building one day during the play’s run. He was medium-sized, just barely shabby about the sport coat, with thick dark-blonde hair and beard. Looked every inch the intellectual pot-head.

          We’d met before, and he looked at me funny for a moment there in the elevator, and he said, “Richard, I didn’t know that you could act.”

          I gestured vaguely toward my three-piece suit and my briefcase and said to him, “Well, what the fuck d’you think I’m doing right now, Ron?” And we became sort of tangential friends after that. Not close: his wife didn’t approve, I don’t think, but we got along. We scored pot for each other once or twice and exchanged kind words occasionally.

          After I left the advertising business for good, swearing that I’d sooner shit in my pants than ever sell another ad, I got a call from Ron, who’d become chief Sunday and features editor at the Express-News. He put me on to Ben King, the editor of the Friday tabloid, the Weekender, and my neighbour Steve at the Sunday magazine, which was called the Star, and I started to get freelance writing assignments. Feature stuff. Fluff, for the most part, but plenty of it.

          A year or two later I heard that Ron had made an announcement in the news room that he thought ‘drugs’ (which ones I don’t think he specified) had been hampering his effectiveness as an editor, and that he was going all-natural from that day on.

          After I stopped writing stuff for the Express-News we lost touch with each other.